Valentine

Filthy: My cousin Larry wanted to go to the movies with me this week. Back at his group home, his roommates have been making fun of him. I don't know why one retard makes fun of another, and Larry won't tell me. He was in no hurry to go home, so we spent all Friday afternoon at the AMC eating leftover, half-price Christmas candy and theater-hopping. Well, we paid to see Head Over Heels and then tried to slip into Valentine, but the fat fucking teenager who was guarding the door demanded to see our tickets.

Usually, when you go to the movies with someone who drools and limps, you've got carte blanche to go into any theater you like. But not with Hitler Junior watching the door. Normally, I support a kid who's doing his damn job, but this snot-nosed prick asked to see our tickets, and Larry's a fucking retard. You don't ask a retard and his guardian to prove they aren't crooks. A retard trumps all else.

Larry: Remember when you made me cry at the bowling place and then it was free?

Filthy: That was a fun day and Arvada Lanes showed some class by not raising a stink. But not at the AMC. I had to go out and buy two more tickets. Luckily for me, I'm working again and I've got cash. I got a paycheck advance from CashXpress for the 16 hours I already put in at First American Video. It's almost $100 after taxes. Fucking sweet.

Larry: I don't like HitlerJunior.

Filthy: Neither do the girls at his high school, I'm sure.

Larry: We should stick a Popsicle up his butt and then make him eat it.

Filthy: What did I tell you about being dirty?

Larry: Don't steal your gimmick.

Filthy: Thank you. Anyway, Larry and I are going to do a little Ebert-Roeper action this week, like we did for Coyote Ugly. Larry, you'll be Roeper and I'll be Ebert.

Larry: No! I'm always Roeper. I hate Roeper.

Filthy: Everybody does, but you're more like him. First, we'll talk about Head Over Heels, a wet shitstain that soaked all the way through the underpants of cinema. This is Hollywood puking up macaroni and cheese leftovers, packing them up and shipping them to movie theaters.

Head Over Heels is further proof that the fucking assholes in Hollywood don't care about making art. Movies like this are assembled like curling irons to be sold at WalMart. The execu-fucks don't even start out thinking about making something good, and that's before they make sacrifices and compromises to save money. The only justification behind this crap is to say "It'll make money," or maybe they delude themselves by saying, "If we can make one really stupid 13-year-old laugh, then we've done our job."

Good fucking God, whoever wrote it learned about life fromSuddenly Susan reruns but can't quite recapture that magic. In fact, the four men directly responsible have loads of experience on failed sitcoms.

Larry: I hated it. I wanted to play Star Wars video games but Filthy wouldn't let me.

Filthy: That's right. If I suffer, you suffer. That's how families work. In a story that steals freely from bad sitcoms and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Monica Potter plays a shy, unlucky-in-love art restorer at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why that museum would ever let anything as artless and classless as this be associated with it is completely beyond me. Potter walks in on her boyfriend having sex with a supermodel, and develops a dislike for beautiful women.

So, imagine the hilarity that ensues when she has to move in with four supermodels in a huge, superfancy Manhattan apartment. You'll have to because the movie sure as fuck doesn't. When moving into the apartment, Potter gets mauled and humped by Freddie Prinze's dog. In one of many sequences more shrivleled and lifeless than my dick after a dip in a spring creek, Potter keeps accidentally mixing up the words dick and dog, leading to such witty dialog as "Get your dick--uh, I mean dong--I mean, dog off me!" and "You have a big dick--uh, I mean dong--I mean dog." She also later confuses "I've got to run" with "I've got the runs." This is about as funny as scirrhosis of the liver, and more painful.

Can you imagine how fucking embarrassed you would be to say a line like that? Well, imagine how many producers, executives, writers and actors just let it slide so it ended up in our laps.

Larry: Why'd they keep saying dick? Nobody showed his wiener.

Filthy: It's part of the comedy.

Larry: I don't get it.

Filthy: You won't when you're older, either. Anyway, the four dumbest, histrionic, cliched and ugliest supermodels take Potter under their wings because she's about as smart (and sexy) as a third grader. From the window of the apartment they share, Potter spies on usually shirtless Prinze. He's a fashion designer who never actually designs anything. She's all slippery for him, but leery, of course, because man have always treated her so bad. She suspects everything he does is going to turn out bad. But no! He's actually the nicest guy in the world, buying candy from Girl Scouts, teaching Little League baseball. (See the writers need these trite devices to show he's a good guy because they have no idea how to give him any real personality). Potter falls for him like the shit-for-brains she is, until she sees him murder someone, or so she thinks.

Larry: I knew he didn't because he's a big girly sissy boy.

Filthy: Excellent point. Plus, he's the romantic lead and star of the movie, so anyone stupid enough to think he might actually be a killer probably also gets delighted every time a micorwave pops popcorn. "Again? How does it do that?!"

This story is just lame cliché piled onto lame cliché. The supermodels are dumb, men stumble over themselves for them, they love clothes and makeup, all they care about is themselves. Potter physically gets weak in the knees whenever she sees Prinze. She has a chorus of old biddies at work who-SURPRISE-say raunchy things. Oh, my goodness, old people being crude, how original and outrageous.

Freddie Prinze has about as much star power as a 4-watt Christmas bulb. He's a bad actor with one stupid expression, crappy delivery, no subtlety and the sexual magnetism of maggot-filled horseshit.

Larry: He needs to blow his nose.

Filthy: Huh?

Larry: He talks through his nose and it's stuffy.

Filthy: Yes, I think you're right, Larry. Monica Potter is bad, but not half as bad as her awful role. She wanders through the film with the blissed-out look of a cheap whore on day four of a shoe salesmen convention, stunned and wobbly. But, all of the women in this movie are written to be so stupid that everything that surprises them. Nobody who loves movies or women would make a story with women so fucking stupid. And they wouldn't ask amateurs to assume painfully bad foreign accents. Foreign accents are not funny, they're a weak excuse for bad, xenophoic jokes.

Larry: The black girl was cute.

Filthy: That's true, Tomiko Fraser is cute, and some day she may be a good enough actress to do community theater. The rest should be serving chicken kiev at the Elizabeth Howard Dinner Theater.

Larry: Remember the stinky toilet joke?

Filthy: Which one? This movie actually goes to the crapper twice. Talk about creative bankruptcy. First is when, after a setup that we've seen a thousand times (the girls are searching his apartment and he comes through the door so they have to disappear quick!), the supermodels hide in Prinze's shower while he takes a very loud, wet dump. Oh, fuck, that's funny! He makes stinky poop and they almost gag. Jesus, I should be charging people seven bucks to come over to my house after I drink a twelve pack.

Larry: I make stinky poop, too, after Mrs. Wilson makes Pickle Surprise for dinner.

Filthy: Later, the supermodels have to hide in a bathroom again, and a mishap results in them getting doused in shit. When the models aren't dealing with other people's bowels, they are making montages of putting on clothes and makeup to Go-Gos songs. I wonder, did the filmmakers make a conscious decision to only do scenes that have been done a thousand times before, or are they just so used to making shitty sitcoms that they think it's standard procedure?

Here is an example of the level of wit in this script:

(A supermodel is looking at a painting Potter is restoring at work.)
Model: Why does he only have one eye?
Lesbian coworker: That's because you're looking at him from the side. You see, that his profile.
Model: Ohhhhh.

The makers think we are 1. Stupid enough to laugh at this, 2. Stupid enough to believe characters can be that stupid, 3. Stupid enough to need a full explanation.

Larry: I knew it was the side of his face.

Filthy: that's because you're smarter than the moviemakers. I should point out that Potter paints Prinze's face into a lost masterpiece by Titian. That's how fucking lame Head Over Heels is. We're not supposed to be offended by the defacing of a masterpiece because Potter loves Prinze. One Finger for Head Over Heels, a comedy too stupid even for a retard.

Larry: One Finger from me, too. Let's stick it up that Prinze guy's nose and clean out the boogers so he talks better.

Filthy: The other movie we endured was Valentine, a movie that would have sucked for free, but was even worse since Hitler Junior made us pay. I swear to God, I will live to make that brat at the Westminster Pavilions AMC be sorry for the day he caught me trying to rip them off.

Larry: I liked Valentine. The grandpa was very scary, like ours.

Filthy: What grandpa?

Larry: The old guy.

Filthy: I'm not sure what you're talking about. Anyway, first I want to say how pissed I am that this nation is raising a generation of shitty actors. Look, I don't give a flying squirrel's nuts if these kids can read or write, I need them to entertain me and our schools are failing. Less arithmetic and more improv exercises, for Christ's sake.

Valentine is the story of four friends from grade school who are now 22. When they were 12 they made classmate Jeremy Melton's life miserable, and now, ten years later, he has come back to seek his revenge by killing each of them. It's supposed to be a big mystery who the killer is, and we're not supposed to know David Boreanaz is Jeremy Melton until the end, but fuck if it could be anyone else. Of course it's him.

Larry: Grandpa is the killer.

Filthy: No, David Boreanaz is.

Larry: He plays the grandpa.

Filthy: He's supposed to be 22.

Larry: He looks like a grandpa.

Filthy: I know, but he's supposed to be just out of college.

Larry: I bet he's a grandpa.

Filthy: Larry, if you could get revenge on anyone, who would it be and how would you do it?

Larry: Michael and Steve for making fun of my rubber bed sheets.

Filthy: Are they the ones teasing you? Is that why you wanted to get out of the house?

Larry: Maybe. But I'm getting even.

Filthy: How?

Larry: Can't say.

Filthy: You know who I'm getting even with? All the girls who wouldn't go out with me or made fun of me for being a loser. I'm not going to kill them. That's the work of a hack. Here's my plan: I'm going to keep on being pathetic, and they'll keep making fun of me. We'll all get older, and I will still be a pathetic loser and they'll still make fun of me. We'll be senior citizens, and I'll still be a loser and they'll still make fun of me. Finally, when we're all really old, I'll still be a pathetic loser and those girls will get bored with making fun of me. I'll fall in the shower and break my hip and die, and they'll feel terrible for making fun of me. They'll hardly be able to live with themselves. See, I'll have the last laugh.

Larry: I don't get it.

Filthy: Yes, it's subtle. Valentine is the second example this week of what a bunch of fucking hacks Hollywood writers, directors and producers are. How can a movie that doesn't have a single original idea in it get past so many people? I can only assume that Warner Brothers executives do not see or like movies. Otherwise, someone would stop and say, "Wait, this sucks in exactly the same way as the last five Friday the 13ths!" "A villain who has a chronically bloody nose? This is bullshit!"

The plodding pacing and dull murders here are supposed to be held together by a mystery that's obvious from scene one. First, it's a plot we've all seen before, and so are the murders and the characters. It goes beyond being lame, though. It's like director Jamie blanks knows we've all seen his movie before, so he doesn't even bother to make it suspenseful. He bowls his way through the story like Mrs. Filthy at a Fashion Bug 20% off sale. There is no subtlety, no creepy scares.

Larry: I was scared when the Grandpa was going to touch his granddaughter in a bad place. She should say NO!

Filthy: He's not the grandpa. The acting is uniformly shitty and flat. Denise Richards is no longer hot. She looks more and more like a human caricature each year, and she's only worth watching when she takes her top off.

Larry: She doesn't show her boobies. That makes Larry very sad.

Filthy: Boreanaz playing 22 is about as believable as me playing sober on a Saturday night. The other ladies are quite unattractive, but killed quickly.

Larry: But they aren't really dead, right? It was just a movie.

Filthy: They aren't really dead.

Larry: I didn't like any of those girls because they were noisy and mean, but it's good they're not dead. Maybe they will learn to be actors or become pretty someday.

Filthy: Valentine reaches the inevitable ending in the house where the power's gone out, the phones are dead, and the heroine runs upstairs. The final scene is Boreanaz dripping blood from his nose onto the lone survivor. Give me a fucking break.

Larry: Me too. I want one.

Filthy: One more finger up the ass of Hollywood.

Larry: One more! Take that!

Filthy: Ready to go home, Larry?

Larry: Can I borrow your fishing hooks?